Showing off Customer Care: How US Airlines Deploy Impression Management by Publicizing Customer Care on Twitter

Organizational Impression Management (OIM) has received increased attention over the recent decades. Studies on OIM via social media platforms investigate the public posts by organizations targeted at general audience. In this study, we highlight the importance of organizations' individual replies to their customers as an indicator of their attempt to conduct and possibly "show-off' their customer care process on social media. We analyze the Twitter accounts of 11 major U.S. airline companies and perform a linguistic analysis on their reply-to-customer tweets. We also categorize airlines into two revenue categories of high and low revenue per available seat miles. Results reveal that airlines in higher revenue category show different behavior in terms of Twitter adoption in their customer care process; both from the tweet rate and linguistic perspectives. We provide insights on how airlines adopted Twitter to practice direct assertive and defensive OIM tactics via public customer care.